SPILT MILK
PEKING DIARY, by Derk Bodde; Jonathan Cape. English price, 16/-. "HESE impressions of Peking in 1948 and 1949, before, during and after its seizure by the Communists, are a
sober and _ honest record of things seen by a Chinesespeaking American professor who has long known China. Derk Bodde commends the order and incorruptibility of the new China; he acknowledges its mistakes, particularly the ineptitude of its propaganda. At the same time he criticises his own country for its blind support of the impossible Kuomin-
tang regime: "The United States, by its concrete policy in China, has done as much as anyone else to discredit, in the eyes of thinking Chinese, those abstract democratic principles which it would most like to see function there." Since this book was written the Korean war has made any sort of rapprochement between the democracies and the new China infinitely more difficult, and we can scarcely make the same answer today to the inevitable question, "What can we save from this wreck?" A backward country trying to better itself by imposing socialism on a disintegrating society notoriously lacking in social consciousness is one thing; a nation abandoning internal reconstruction for
war is another.
David
Hall
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 660, 29 February 1952, Page 12
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202SPILT MILK New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 660, 29 February 1952, Page 12
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